LAUSR

wet-nurse or dai was another household figure who could expose the vulnerabilities of the memsahib, which led to her being cast as a figure who ‘exercised power over and tyrannised [her] employers in diverse ways’ (134). Sen does an excellent job in this chapter of showing us how the domestic sphere became a site of various colonial anxieties because it stripped memsahibs of key maternal responsibilities and delegated them to low-caste Indian women. Briefly considering the lives of ‘barrack wives’, Sen turns to administrative and medical reports to understand how these women were disadvantaged across both gender and class lines. When barrack wives became widowed due to non-commissioned soldiers’ poor health, such women had no choice but to turn to selling sex for material survival. For one widowed barrack wife, ‘the only assistance she received from ... connections with the army ... was being kept as a personalised prostitute by an army officer’ (194). These white women, Sen claims, were especially vulnerable to being diagnosed with mental health problems and would often be institutionalized in lunatic asylums. Their physical ailments, the author suggests, give us a brief glimpse into the under-examined story of lower class white women suffering sexual exploitation and experiencing class and gender oppression in the colony. Overall, this book does well to make the fascinating encounters of white women in colonial India intelligible to a general audience as well as to those more familiar with themes of gender and empire within South Asian history. In demonstrating how memsahibs and missionaries refashioned the ‘Self ’ through their engagement with Indian women, while also scrutinizing the ideological contents of the ‘civilizing mission’ they partook in, Sen brings a postcolonial perspective to the ‘new imperial history’ approach. However, Sen’s broad focus remains on memsahibs and missionaries, whereas a more detailed venture into the lives of barrack wives could have led to a fuller exploration of the category ‘white woman’. This book also does not mention the category of European prostitutes in India, which could have been used to explore how occupational status battled with race privilege among a certain class of white women. Further, Sen makes generous use of the term ‘gendered’, making a case for ‘gendered social reform’, ‘gendered relationships’ and ‘gendered life’ without ever making explicit what precisely it means to be ‘gendered’. Nonetheless, Sen’s book has presented an extremely accessible account of white women’s experiences from the zenana to the colonial home to the barracks, all within an intricate web of gender, race and class relations.